


it's me

by bachmanroad



Category: Five Nights at Freddy's
Genre: Gore, Horror, Violence, minimalist
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-31
Updated: 2014-10-31
Packaged: 2018-02-23 10:09:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,464
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2543717
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bachmanroad/pseuds/bachmanroad
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The horrible history of Freddy Fazbear's Pizza told in five parts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	it's me

**Author's Note:**

> please check the warning above. if there is anything you feel that i should have tagged, please let me know.

i.

 

‘come out, come out, little darlings! We need to get you dressed for tonight’s performance. your co-stars are waiting!’

 

the Man Inside Freddy moves down the shiny waxed floors, his fuzzy paws masking his steps. he listens for the sound of the little ones that he is playing hide and seek with in the after-hour twilight of the restaurant. down the hall, there is the sharp clang of a saucepan hitting the floor. the Man Inside Freddy twists the rope in his ungloved hands, the only part of him naked, and sets off for the kitchen.  

 

he finds his little chicken nesting inside one of the cupboards, her breathing spasmic, eyes wet and wide. he ties her up like a christmas goose and drags her behind him as he dances down to the dining hall. 

 

the other little swashbuckler is hiding inside pirate cove. the Man watches as she peeks her face between the heavy velvet curtains, moving in a slow one-man game of grandma’s footsteps. she freezes when she spies him watching her. the cunning little vixen takes one look at his trussed up chicken and tries to bolt down the west wing corridor, but the Man Inside Freddy is quicker, and soon she is tied up too. 

 

the clock in the storeroom says it is midnight. the Man Inside Freddy drags his little animals inside, and sets them down next to the other three. all of them are shaking, sweating, one covered in vomit. soon, they will all be beautiful. 

 

‘the arena is full,’ the Man Inside Freddy says, solemn as a priest. ‘the arena is full from top to bottom.’

 

he opens up the first costume. the chicken. inside, the endoskeleton shines. 

 

‘a black eye watches.’ the Man, still preaching to his five man congregation in the back room of a pizzaria. ‘love awaits each and every one of you.’

 

the Man Inside Freddy, his hands the only things that are naked, gets down on one knee and presses his muzzle in close to the new bandmates. the golden fur does not muffle his voice at all. 

 

‘it is a necessary pain. the audience must have their show, and for that we must give them our blood. our souls.’ 

 

the chicken is completed with two sharp pushes and a sharper scream. a fox and a bunny quickly follow. 

 

‘love awaits us all,’ says the Man. he opens up the last suit, a second Freddy. regular one o clock performance Freddy. not like the Freddy the Man is inside, who only sings on birthdays. Golden Freddy is very special.  

 

a bear joins the band. the other suits gurgle hello.  

 

the last band member breathes in relief. there are no more costumes; he is saved. he decides that will escape and call the police, escape and yell and scream until he can yell and scream no more. 

 

‘they will all celebrate your courage,’ the Man says. 

 

the Man descends upon the last bandmate. the chick, the fox, the bunny, and the bear cannot tear their new eyes away from what the Man Who Used to be Inside Freddy does to him. 

 

 

on the wall, the clock ticks _six._

 

 

at six thirty am, the morning manager finds that the staff door has been jammed open. she scours the halls, but finds nothing missing and no one extra hiding inside. satisfied, she takes her morning paperwork and coffee, and sits down in the dining hall. 

 

on stage, the band is still. the curtains of pirate cove are closed.

 

at seven, she realises that she has not seen the night security guard. the band is still on stage, and the curtains of pirate cove are still closed. the night security guard usually clocks out at six twenty, and spends the last ten minutes before the morning shift arrives cleaning up his office and brewing a pot of coffee. this morning, the coffee pot had been full and warm, but the security guard had not quickly checked in with her at six thirty five as usual.

 

the manager bumps into him coming out of his office, his uniform rumpled, his head the only part of him naked.

 

‘Good morning,’ he says, ‘I made coffee.’

 

‘I saw, thanks,’ the manager says. What she really wants to ask is what has happened to his hat, and why is he so late leaving? ‘Have you punched out yet?’

 

‘Yes, sorry. I was busy, working on a project last night. A personal project. It took me longer to clean up after myself than usual. Does the band look well this morning?’ his eyes are glassy and his gaze is far away, behind them, the manager thinks she sees a crowd, cheering.

 

‘They look fine,’ is all she says. 

 

‘One day,’ the security guard says, ‘I shall have to come in for lunch so that I can see them sing.’

 

the manager watches as he bids her farewell, and takes off down the hallway, whistling _hmm hm hm hmm hmm_. 

 

inside his office are a pair of golden Freddy Fazbear gloves.  

 

 

the morning rolls into the afternoon. the doors are opened, and the halls fill with the laughter of children and the tinny computer sounds of video games. at one o clock, the first Freddy and Friend’s show begins. 

 

it’s Chica’s birdy song, the one that encourages five lucky children to come up on stage and dance with the band members. one child, a toddler, is carried up by his big sister. as they all twirl and sing, parents take photographs. 

 

Foxy’s curtain opens and the pirate’s pizza ditty fills the restaurant. he swings his sharp hook, and his gold teeth flash beneath the spotlight. Freddy and his Friends encourage the kids to sing the special sharing song to stop Foxy from stealing all of their pizza. 

 

the children clap, then cry, when the band announces that they will be taking a half an hour break before the next show. now restless, they wander the dining hall, those who weren’t lucky enough to be part of Chica’s song climb up on the stage and hug the legs of the gargantuan animatronics. parents are quick to follow them, tugging them from their perch on Bonny’s torso or Chica’s leg. the pleasant chatter of the restaurant turns into concerned murmurs as the parents frantically signal for restaurant staff whilst shielding their children’s eyes. 

 

all of the animatronics are bleeding.

 

ii.

 

Martin Dante is arrested the next day. the management post an advertisement for a new night security guard in less than twenty-four hours after his arrest. they decline to make a public statement.

 

iii.

 

Oliver, two weeks shy of eighteen and with barely enough facial hair to warrant shaving, slumps against the hostess stand. business is only now picking back up, and no matter how often he and the other minimum wage workers scrub at the stage and the animatronic’s costumes, the rank smell of death and the fetid mucus that lines the eyes and joints of the bandmates never goes away. 

 

with only five minutes until he clocks off, Oliver turns his attentions to the stage. Freddy and Friend’s hold shorter performances now; only Foxy sings for the usual amount of time. the animatronics tend to get buggy the longer they perform. 

 

‘an’ what’s yer name, bucko?’ Foxy asks, his servos lowering him down into a crouch. 

 

‘Sam!’

 

‘Sam, eh? i say, bucko, ye look aw-w-w-w-‘ the fox’s voice box stutters. ‘w-w-w fully familiar! what grade be ye in?’

 

‘fifth,’ says Sam.

 

Foxy leans in closer. ‘and are you still a bully, sam? do you still push ov-v-v-v-er lit-t-t-le ones and make them _cryyyyyyy_?’

 

Oliver yawns. the new AI management had installed used to be unnerving, until he got used to the sight of the animatronics bickering and cajoling the kids six days a week for seven hours a day. the shift changeover is in two minutes.

 

‘i never did that!’ says Sam. Sam’s parents are too busy arguing with each other to notice the exchange. the waitresses are all out back, smoking away the last few minutes of their shift. Sam, his horrible parents, and Oliver are the only ones in the dining hall.

 

‘i say it’s time ye walked the plank, bucko! i’ll make ye cry!’ 

 

with speed Oliver didn’t know the animatronic possessed, it lunges at Sam in his store-bought pirate costume. the 200lb animatronic tumbles, and Sam’s head is lodged in it’s jaws.

 

on stage, Freddy, Chica, and Bonnie have all turned to face pirate cove.

 

 

it takes five firefighters to prize Sam’s head from Foxy’s mouth. by the time he is released, the birthday boy is dead-eyed and drooling. his parents continue to fight in the back of his ambulance.

 

‘did it really bite him?’ the shift changeover asks Oliver. they are smoking out back with the waitresses.

 

‘I dunno, it happened too fast, I don’t know.’ 

 

‘what should we do with him?’

 

‘I rang management,’ says Ollie. ‘they said to just turn him off and leave him behind the curtain. pirate cove is out of order.’ 

 

 

ten cigarettes later, Ollie and the waitresses finally feel brave enough to power down Foxy, but the animatronic is already behind pirate cove’s curtain. the police must have closed it once they took their evidence. unnerved but thankful, Ollie goes into the animatronic control room behind the main stage and powers Foxy down. 

 

it takes them three hours to mop up all of Sam’s blood from the floor. Ollie switches off the lights and calls the night security guard in early. as he crosses the dining hall for the final time, he hears;

 

‘mommy, Sam is mean to me, mommy, Sam is mean to me, mommy, Sam is mean to me, mom-m-m-m-my, Sam is m-e-e-e-an…’

 

iv.

 

between the years nineteen eighty-seven and nineteen ninety-nine, Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza loses twenty-three night security guards. in the early two-thousands, the management decide to install the cheapest blast doors they can find, something old and possibly ex-military, into the security office. to do this, they have to sell the office’s power generator that powers it’s equipment at night. 

 

they compromise on a rechargeable battery generator and publish a new security manual that preaches power saving practices. they hand it out to each new colleague along with their uniform. 

 

in the years between two-thousand and one, and two-thousand and nine, the company only loses two guards. 

 

all staff report that the robots seem more active day and night since these changes were made. 

 

v.

 

on the eve of his seventh night at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, Mike Schmidt arrives to work early. he strolls down the checkered halls lined with pizza crumbs, and over carpets sticky with cheap soda, to the little room next to the dining hall. inside is one single computer, the admin login and password written on a post-it note and stuck to the peeling and pock-marked cork noticeboard. Mike logs in quickly, his fingers hitting the keyboard in time with the second hand on the clock hanging on the wall. it is twenty past eleven at night.

 

Mike still can’t believe it took him all week to think of changing the settings for the animatronics on the back computer. it’s almost a little embarrassing, being a man who was a teenager in the noughties, but he blames the outdated, dizzy, nostalgic feeling that the restaurant evokes, like he is lucid dreaming, for not having considered it sooner. his bosses, all already middle-aged in the eighties, would never know so long as he remembered to re-adjust all the settings before they came in at six thirty. 

 

the back office computer is laid out shockingly simply. changing the animatronics AI is as simple as sliding a bar from 0 to 20. there is a tooltip icon in the corner. Mike clicks it, and a tiny pixel Freddy head pops up, a speech bubble forming on the screen. 

 

‘Hi! Welcome to the Miracle Creation’s Artificial Intelligence menu! Our revolutionary AI system allows your animatronics to ‘think’ for themselves. Setting ’20’ allows your animatronics to learn and utilise several commands, making them great entertainers and even security for your business. However, if you wish to use a more conventional method in your business for our top of the range animatronics, just slide the bar down to ‘0’ and use the peripheral software for all of your choreography and other miscellaneous inputs. Remember, an animatronic set on ‘0’ cannot access it’s AI databases. When you’re ready, select your AI level!’ 

 

Mike whistles as he slides all of the bars down to 0, the noise not dissimilar to the pathetic falling sound Wile. E Coyote makes whenever he falls off a cliff in Loony Tunes. he spares a quick look at the clock; eleven thirty. more than enough time to examine some more of the animatronics settings before the restaurant’s power goes out. Mike thinks that tonight, he will bed down in the security office and have a nap. 

 

the other settings are pretty basic, just pre-programmed dance moves and singing volume. something niggles at the back of Mike’s brain like an itch as he stares at the screen, but everything he is looking for seems to be there, and there is nothing else of interest. Mike decides not to press his luck further by changing boring theatrical settings meant for children. he puts the computer back on stand-by and trots leisurely around the corner to his office. 

 

as Mike makes a comfy little fortress in the footwell of his desk, he chuckles to himself over the ridiculousness of the situation. how panicked he had gotten these last six nights, how close to death he found himself over and over again, just to come back the next night because, by morning, all of the terror seemed as far away as a fever dream. he is just drifting off nicely as all of the clocks in the pizzeria chime twelve. but as the fingers of sleep dig their claws into poor Mike Schmidt, just as he has finally convinced himself that the all too real terror of his situation was only his overactive imagination, he is snapped back into full consciousness by a terrible, gut-sinking feeling of fridge horror.

 

there had been no setting to stop the animatronics from walking. all he had done was dumbed them down from automatic to manual. there had been no option to stop them from coming off the stage at all. 

 

_there was no such thing as a free-roaming mode._

 

the clock chimes one.

 

_there was no such thing as a free-roaming mode._

 

from the security feeds, he hears something clattering around in the kitchen.

 

 _there was_ no such thing _as a free-roaming mode._

 

in the deep dark, Freddy and his Friends _sing._

 

**Author's Note:**

> i don't know why ao3 formatted it like that.


End file.
